Conspiracy theorists and other concerned citizens will insist the government is watching every keystroke, keeping a record of every website, transaction, text and email. Shades of 1984’s Big Brother, right?

These last few weeks, the news has been brimming with revelations of data surveillance and monitoring by the government (not to mention data harvesting corporations like Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc…). Everyone is sensitive as to what is being looked at, stored, and analyzed for hazily defined purposes. Privacy is no longer as private as you think; and hasn’t been for many years.

Politics, ethics and debates over 4th amendment interpretation aside (as they serve no useful purpose in this analysis), a question was asked on one the security forums that in light of these alleged breaches of trust, whether cloud security-and more specifically, identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) is still a feasible and trustworthy option?

Short answer: of course it is …